Chapter 1
Zeke Reilly used to flirt with his mother-in-law. Nothing dangerous. A pinch on the cheek, a wink like they had an inside joke. But there was always a subtle sexual overtone in their interaction, like the muted roar of a wild river under the ground, like there was a raging desire between them but buried deep under layers of social convention and surrounded by thick stone walls of taboo. Like, what could happen if ... rippled through every hello, every smile.
But those monolithic walls never actually shook much, let alone crumbled, and the tectonic plates of convention held solid over the torrent underneath. Aside from their small flirtations, nothing in his socially sanctioned relationship with Judy slipped, even a little, except in his dreams.
At least in Zeke's dreams things were different, but then everything is different in the quagmire of the subconscious, or so he told himself mornings after Judy's apparitional caresses had jolted through every corpuscle in his body and he awoke exhausted and sweating.
His mother-in-law had a different view of dreams and other like products of the human psyche. She had told Zeke several times that his dreams and waking premonitions and déjà vu experiences, experiences he'd tried to ignore since he was nine, were a natural function of the spirit, spiritus she called it.
"That portion of you that comes from God but that precedes even Him," she said, "that is more than merely eternal as in been-around-forever ... more like always-was in the sense of always-will-be."
Judy liked such language, convoluted and strange, no matter how remotely spiritual or philosophical the subject. For Judy the price of vegetables or the barometric pressure or a flea market could be the inspiration for existential and phenomenal discourse. Such language alternately embarrassed Zeke, especially if he'd had concupiscent dreams recently, confused him, made him nauseous, amazed him, or made him nearly swoon with affection for the tiny redheaded woman out of whose mouth the words swam like fish, flew like birds, galloped like wild sweat-soaked horses with rippling muscles. His reaction tended to depend on where his own psychic barometer was on that given day.
Today he just wanted to hear Judy's voice, to watch her throat move gently as she talked, to imagine her lips doing magic tricks like he had dreamt the night before.
"It seems so strange to you, to us all on those rare occasions it happens to most of us," she said, "because of our limited apprehension, you might even say our misapprehension, of time. Time is a simultaneity, not a river flowing from some unknowable source to some unknowable terminus. It is multitudinous possibility that we all sample in our dreams but explain away as some kind of psychological detritus, as meaningless interference in our normal, as in waking and rational, consciousness."
Pictures of Judy's mouth moving over him from his dreams the previous night flashed through Zeke's imagination like his own personal pornographic movie. He could feel his ears growing red hot, the electric tingle in his pants.
"And some few, like you Zeke, sample time, investigate the possibilities, while walking around, or sitting at the table, or driving to work."
"Or pooping," Zeke joked, trying to hide his embarrassment. "Some people read Time magazines on the pot, some visit the beyond." He winked at Judy across the table. At that moment there was a rumbling in Zeke's inner ear like far off thunder. The sky out Judy's kitchen window began to swirl over the Rocky Mountains. The mountains themselves began to swirl. This was prelude to a vision, but Zeke pretended it wasn't happening. Sometimes he could hold off the experience, the disconcerting shift in consciousness, if he pretended hard enough it wasn't happening. Sometimes, inevitable as rain, nothing stopped it, and his being was flooded with sensory information all jumbled together but also heightened beyond what he saw or heard or smelled normally. Normal, he thought, Judy might ridicule the notion, but he longed for the status quo of everyday mind, for this sensory disruption to fade.
He could hear Marianne whistling Bach in her mother's bathroom over the din in his head. She'd been fixing her hair for twenty minutes, probably listening to their conversation. She'd noticed the way Zeke looked at her mother and even accused him once of lusting after her in his heart, a phrase she'd borrowed from a former President of the United States. He'd told her she was crazy, that he was just very fond of their conversations, though he knew she didn't completely buy it and watched and listened closer now.
Marianne must have grown tired of listening to them talk today, or just knew the conversation was over, like usual, when Zeke said something he intended to be funny to take the edge off his own uneasiness, to lighten the mystical subject, but that always came out silly, trivial.
Marianne was whistling mightily now, one of the Brandenburg Concertos. Zeke didn't know Bach well enough to know which one.
She had the unique ability to whistle contrapuntally, which made her renditions of Bach almost dazzling. She said it had something to do with the gap between her upper incisors, but she never explained her talent to him beyond that, or probably to herself. Marianne was her mother's antithesis.
When they first met seven years before, she used to whistle in bed after sex. Zeke knew then the sex was just so-so, and it remained so-so to this very morning's slap-dash before he showered and shaved, but the music added enough, somehow, to make it adequate. Marianne only whistled once in a while now, and never after sex.
Judy was putting water on for tea. Zeke was sorry she stopped talking. Today, he loved her abstraction. It reminded him of Yeats' poetry. He was reading the Collected Shorter Poems between customers at the bookstore where he was the night clerk. Besides, if she talked, the thunder and dizziness could be ignored a little more easily, if he had something else to focus on ....
Zeke held his hand to his heart dramatically: " 'Gaze no more on the phantoms, Nianh said, And kissed my eyes, and, swaying her bright head, And her bright body, sang of faery and man, Before God was or my old line began.' "
Judy folded her thin arms and smiled at him from where she stood before the stove. Zeke's blurred vision settled on the gray streaks at her temples that seemed to shimmer like lightning bolts, and the noise in his head grew louder.
"I might sing to you of the same things, something in Latin to match Marianne's ecstatic whistling." She nodded toward the bathroom. Marianne was racing up and down the minor scales two steps at a time like the world's fastest human would take stairs.
"But I wouldn't recommend not looking at what only you can see."
The thunder in Zeke's inner ear began to subside and the dizziness was nearly gone. He'd managed to hold the vision off, whatever it was, by ignoring it, for the time being.
"When the very heart strings of God quiver," Judy said, "and another possible world dances into focus, it could be damned dangerous not to pay very close attention."
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